While Nomad visas can offer good employees unlimited flexibility to begin a new chapter of life in their dream destination, companies face a harder time managing identity access if their entire workforce is remote.
A new report by Regula comments on the surge of digital nomad living and transit working lifestyles which in turn leaves companies open to more identity fraud. Workforces that are largely scattered remotely across the world will test their IT infrastructure, the report suggests, by trying to authenticate from foreign locations and IP addresses.
What is a benefit for long-serving employees can give businesses unforeseen security challenges and test how efficient their identity verification is.
The globalisation of digital nomad communities means more physical, or even electronic, foreign IDs are at risk of theft by fraudsters to gain access to confidential company data.
Regula, a global developer of forensic devices and identity verification solutions, reports that 80% of decision makers correlate a spike in identity fraud within their organisation to digital nomad programmes.
40% of businesses cited a rising challenge in identity fraud when it comes to identity verification procedures for digital nomads. The companies most likely to approve off-site workers are in the Financial Services and Insurance industries, with issuance of foreign IDs for these workers rising by 25% and 27%, respectively.
The regions with the most foreign document verification cases are the U.S. and UAE, however, more countries are welcoming Digital Nomads, reporting an average increase of 21% since the summer of 2021. The systems used by many organisations are not designed for verifying onboarding and authentication attempts from across the world, some of which may be legitimate and others conducted by fraudsters.
The Nomad movement significantly impacts the frequency of breaches for organisations including more staff logins being compromised.
Henry Patishman, Executive Vice President, Identity Verification Solutions at Regula said: “Identity fraud is flourishing, and overall digitalization, along with mass people movement and relocation are creating new pitfalls for businesses, which are trying to keep pace. In this changing world, organizations inevitably need to start adopting new technologies to enable robust and reliable verification, especially for remote processes. They will also be interested in the possibilities to scale and adapt their IDV processes to new scenarios and requirements. Leading vendors like Regula are responding to this shift as well, by introducing new technologies and capabilities for any use case in any industry”.
The solution for 53% of respondents is to favour verifiable eIDs, where a microchip within an electronic document is much harder to counterfeit.
61% of companies said digital nomads will need to hold an eID to work remotely abroad. 57% of organisations have implemented biometric authentication to detect and prevent fraud during the digital onboarding process.
